From the Director's Desk:

"During the months of April May the whole country is busy with Admissions fever. University admissions open; entrance exams are on; some results (like GATE results) are out. This year too all of us (Director, Dean, Registrar, Admissions Committee and Admin staff) were busy answering anxious queries from prospective students and their parents, as our 2-year M.Tech. Admissions would close by the month end. These are good problems to have!

Professors R Chandrashekar and K R V Subramanian were busy in Myanmar, conducting online Admissions Test for admitting the first batch of 30 students to our PGDSD Programme (May 2014 - Jan 2015). This perhaps was the first multi-city online test in Myanmar, with special connectivity challenges. Everything went through smoothly, thanks to extraordinary efforts from IIITB professors, Indian Embassy staff and Government of Myanmar staff; the selected students are expected to arrive in Bangalore on May 2, 2014. With this the first ever programme of M-IIT (Myanmar Institute of Information Technology) - created by the Ministry of External Affairs of the Government of India and the Government of Myanmar) is ON! IIIT-Bangalore is the Mentor Institute for M-IIT.

And of course, many interesting things including the seventh edition of excITe children programme at our campus.

HAPPYREADING

ACHIEVEMENTS

Based on a Peer-team visit on March 17-19, 2014, NAAC has given Grade A (highest grade) accreditation to IIITB.

Navik Yogesh Laljibhai (MT2012086), who is currently interning in Texas Instruments, has won the first prize in Interns' Design contest. An Embedded design is given as a challenge, to be implemented in a period of a month by two-member teams.
The problem statement was to implement a digitally controlled PLL using ASLKv2010 kit and MSP430 launch pad with frequency and Phase display. The event was held during February 1-March 12, and the prize distribution was held on April 11.

Nitin Tailor (MT2007124), our alumnus and a social entrepreneur, has been honoured with "Shree Lajpatray Varma Award" by 102 year old social organization of Bharuch, Gujarath. “Shree Lajptaray Varma award” is being given in memory of freedom fighter Shree Lajpatray by Shree Batuknath trust since last 26 years to the individuals for their bravery, social work, extra ordinary achievements. Nitin was honoured this year for his contributions to society and achievements enabling development in the city of Bharuch. He is the founder of a social venture, Serve Happiness Foundation (http://www.servehappiness.org) and is part of the founding team of OpenFuel (http://www.openfuel.org).

CAMPUS NEWS

Events

39th Senate Meeting of IIITB was held on April 9.

Jugaad Innovation, which was an interactive discussion with authors of the eponymous book, was held at IIITB on April 16. The highlight of the event was the panel discussion anchored by two of the authors of the book, Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu. The other co-author of the book is Simone Ahuja and Kevin Roberts wrote its preface. At the event, the authors discussed the new edition of their book and talked about the theory behind this flexible, frugal and inclusive approach to innovation. The panelists, who are practitioners telling their own real life stories of Jugaad Innovation in action, were Vikram Damodaran, Director Healthcare Innovations, GE Healthcare India and Tina Datta Nayak, Head of Marketing, ZipDial. The discussion was lively and interactive, with the students and invited audience making the best of the opportunity to interact with the authors.
For further details: http://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/media/events/event-details/?ee=23

There was an ACM Siggraph Bangalore chapter Talk on "Physical Visualization of Models: 3D Printing" by Prof. T. K. Srikanth on April 26. Jaya Sreevalsan Nair and Bhardwaj Ramkumar, who are active in the Bangalore chapter, helped organize and host the event at IIITB.

Research admissions closed on April 15. M.Tech. admissions closed on April 30.

As part of our outreach efforts, IIIT-B has been conducting excITe children programme for high school students. The programme first started in 2001 and has become an annual event since 2009. As part of the programme, students interact with IIIT-B faculty in the mornings and visit industries around Electronic City in the afternoon.
This year, we had 38 students from Sri Kumaran's school and 5 students from Navodaya School, Bangalore (rural) participating in the programme. The week-long programme had interactive sessions from Profs. Srikanth (Mobile App Development), Madhav Rao (Robotics), K V Dinesha (Software Engineering). Prof. Kshitish Acharya from IBAB conducted a session on Biotechnology. Fields of View team conducted a session on development of cities as well. The students visited Infosys, Wipro, Siemens, IBAB labs and IIIT-B incubation center.

Publications

The research paper titled "Energy and Delay Constrained Scheduling of Real Time Traffic over OFDM Communication System with Non-causal Channel Information" has been accepted for publication in the Elsevier Journal on Physical Communication. The authors of the paper are Prof. Debabrata Das and Ritesh Kumar Kalle (PH2007901).

The paper titled "Cognitive State Classification Using Transformed fMRI Data", by Profs. Hariharan Ramasangu and Neelam Sinha, has been accepted for publication at the 10th International Conference on Signal Processing and Communications (SPCOM 2014) to be held at IISc, Bangalore, during July 22-25. Prof. Hariharan Ramasangu is a faculty member at M. S. Ramaiah School of Advanced Studies.

Faculty & Staff

Prof. Madhav Rao presented a paper on "Self Assembly based High Frequency Heatsink Antenna" in 2014 IEEE TENSYMP conference held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia during April 14-16. The co-authors of the paper are Neha Oraon (PH2013008) and Putluru Sravani (MS2013004). The conference travel was supported by CEEMS lab project in IIITB. The conference, which provided a view of upcoming bio-electronic devices and neural interfaces, included topics ranging from antennas for mobile LTE applications and higher frequencies, signal processing, and biomedical devices. There were around 410 registered participants from USA, India, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Germany, UK and other countries in the conference.
For further details:http://ieeemy.org/tensymp/.

Profs. S. Rajagopalan and Amit Prakash were invited to attend a 4-day workshop on e-Government and Information Security & Privacy organized by the United Nations Asia-Pacific Centre for ICT and Development (UN-APCICT) at Incheon, Republic of Korea during April 15-18. The workshop saw participation of about 30 government officials, policymakers and ICTD trainers from Asia-Pacific and Africa. UN-APCICT and the Center for IT and Public Policy at IIITB are shortly expected to enter into an agreement to collaborate on capacity building of government officials and youth in the area of ICT and Development.

Ms. Roshni D’Souza, has joined IIITB as Officer- Placement, PR and Outreach on April 15.

Students

A poster by Abhilasha Aswal, Anushka Chandrababu, Venkata Sai Sriram Mahavadi, G. Srinivasa Raghvan and G.N. Srinivasa Prasanna, "Indian Railways – A robust optimization based approach to solve problems in complex networks", was presented at the 14th INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research held at Boston, USA during Mar 30 - April 1.

Subha P E (PH2010905) presented the paper titled, "Opportunistic Communication Enabler for IoT/M2M Radio Communications"at IEEE SIEDS'14 Student Workshop, held on April 27-May2 at the University of Virginia,Virginia, USA. She and Prof. Jyotsna Bapat are authors of the paper. The IEEE Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium (SIEDS'14) is a student-focused international forum for applied research, development, and design in Systems and Information Engineering. Subha received full scholarship from IEEE SIEDS to attend the workshop.

Guest Talks

“Explicit Vector Programming”, by Dr. Milind Girkar from Intel on April 22.

Campus Visitors

April 4 - Mr. Amit Chatterjee, Country Director, HP software.

April 7 - Dr. Venkat, ABB

April 9 - Dave Ranson, Managing Director, Moog & Venky IESA

April 10 - Dr. Paventhan of ERNET, IISc

April 15 - Kumar Ramachandran, Vignani Solutions

April 21 - Vinod P Deshmukh, Innovation Hub Technologies Pvt Ltd.

April 28 - Vishal Mehrotra, Sr. General Manager,TCS visits

UPCOMING EVENTS

June 9-13 - The last phase of admissions to the M.S. Research and Ph.D. programmes, for 2014-15, which is interview and domain-wise examinations, if any, will be held at the Institute. .